I am not your guru. I’m a crypto enthusiast, not a professional trader, and I make plenty of mistakes. There are a huge amount of ‘gurus’ and ‘experts’ out there but the truth is that many of them haven’t got a fucking clue what they are talking about. Opinions in cryptocurrency are like assholes, everybody’s got one. It’s extremely easy to predict the market and hell, everybody seems like an expert, when cryptocurrency is experiencing a bull run.

These characteristics make Bitcoin fundamentally different from a fiat currency, which is backed by the full faith and credit of its government. Fiat currency issuance is a highly centralized activity supervised by a nation’s central bank. While the bank regulates the amount of currency issued in accordance with its monetary policy objectives, there is theoretically no upper limit to the amount of such currency issuance. In addition, local currency deposits are generally insured against bank failures by a government body. Bitcoin, on the other hand, has no such support mechanisms. The value of a Bitcoin is wholly dependent on what investors are willing to pay for it at a point in time. As well, if a Bitcoin exchange folds up, clients with Bitcoin balances have no recourse to get them back.

*An accredited investor, in the context of a natural person, includes anyone who either earned income that exceeded $200,000 (or $300,000 together with a spouse) in each of the prior two years, and reasonably expects the same for the current year, OR, has a net worth over $1 million, either alone or together with a spouse (excluding the value of the person’s primary residence).
NOTE: The image below shows daily candles on a 1 year BTC chart. When the short term 12 day exponential moving average crossed under the longer term 26 day in January 2018, it pretty clearly marked the start of a bear market in retrospect (a true correction, not just “a dip”). You can see that buying the dip and holding in this time was not ideal (not the worst move perhaps long term, and not a bad move for short term trades, just not ideal for a buy and hold strategy as far as we know so far). That overarching bear market is an example of a market in which one has to apply a bit more nuance to their “buy the dips” strategy.
Since there is a prevailing thought that the most valuable aspect of bitcoin is the blockchain technology behind it, investing in blockchain is another way of tangentially investing in bitcoin without the worrisome volatility. There are many large companies that have been developing their own blockchain networks for a variety of purposes that may be worth looking into.
Disclaimer: Fusion Media would like to remind you that the data contained in this website is not necessarily real-time nor accurate. All CFDs (stocks, indexes, futures), cryptocurrencies, and Forex prices are not provided by exchanges but rather by market makers, and so prices may not be accurate and may differ from the actual market price, meaning prices are indicative and not appropriate for trading purposes. Therefore Fusion Media doesn't bear any responsibility for any trading losses you might incur as a result of using this data.

Unfortunately, the FDIC is just as dramatically underfunded as banks are. As the FDIC itself acknowledges, it holds enough money to cover just over 1% of all the deposits it insures. In other words, if banks reneged on any more than 1% of all their deposits, the FDIC itself would also fail, and everyone would yet again be left in the dust without recourse.

First one piece of good news: You can buy fractions up to the eighth decimal place of bitcoin. That means you don’t need to plunk down the nearly $17,000 you often see quoted as the price for a full bitcoin — which is probably for the best, as we noted above. As of Thursday afternoon, that one ten-thousandth — four decimal places or 0.0001 — of a bitcoin is worth about $1.65.
I invest in altcoins to grow my BTC position: as such; my altcoin positions are medium to long-term, which is 2–6 months in crypto. As altcoins are traded on most exchanges using the BTC pair, I trade altcoins with the goal of selling the altcoin for more BTC than I paid. This is a new part of my strategy as I historically always tracked investments against fiat but spending time learning from Luke Martin and crucial other Crypto traders have shifted this for me.
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Design issues. Despite Bitcoin's massive rise in popularity over the past several years, it is not immune to design problems. For example, starting late last year Bitcoin transaction speeds became very slow because of a scaling problem related to the way the Bitcoin blockchain works. (You can read the details here.) That issue did not end up creating the existential crisis for Bitcoin that some analysts predicted, and the problem has now more or less been solved via something called SegWit. Still, the Bitcoin scaling issue was a reminder that a new type of serious problem may creep up in the future that undoes Bitcoin.

The purpose of hedging is not to gain from favorable price movements but prevent losses from potentially unfavorable price changes and in the process, maintain a predetermined financial result as permitted under the current market price. To hedge, someone is in the business of actually using or producing the underlying asset in a futures contract. When there is a gain from the futures contract, there is always a loss from the spot market, or vice versa. With such a gain and loss offsetting each other, the hedging effectively locks in the acceptable, current market price.

TIP: In cases where the price of a coin (or another asset) is plunging slowly towards its doom, buying the bottom of a dip can be hard if not impossible to pull off. In cases like this, you more-so end up dollar cost averaging down the side of the mountain. Watching any asset lose value is stressful, but there is a lot of precedent for this paying off in cryptocurrency when we are talking about buying the dips on top coins like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Ripple. No plan is foolproof, but the logic here is this: It is better to mistime buys at the bottom than to mistime buys at the top. Thus, buy the dips…

Like any speculative investment, buying bitcoin at sky-high valuations is risky business. If you’re asking, “Is it smart to invest in bitcoin?” you might do well to heed this advice from billionaire investor Mark Cuban, who told MONEY, “It’s still very much a gamble.” You need to know that your bitcoin investment might lose money. If you’re not prepared to face that prospect, bitcoin investment might not be for you.

Price history: this is relevant if I have made the decision that I want to invest. If it is an established asset I will be looking at its long-term price history, does it move in cycles (see Siacoin as an example), if so, which cycle is it in right now or does it have stable growth (see DASH)? If growth is stable I am less sensitive to the current price as I believe in long-term growth, I will only avoid if it is in a spike and will wait for the price to settle. If it moves in a cycle, unless it is early in a cycle, I will wait until the end of the current cycle before investing.

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In 2011, a study of academics by the University of California indicated that most individual investors achieve results that are worse than standard investment benchmarks. One of the main reasons was that people were trading emotionally, rather than following a clear strategy. Simply put, if in the past they entered a trade that “coincided with pleasure” they would try to repeat those actions and avoid those that “generated pain.”

Last month, Chainalysis published a study revealing that BTC investors and speculators held their positions over the summer, while markets seem to have become more stable overall. The monetary aggregates reportedly were “extremely steady” during the summer, showing that the amount of BTC held for speculation was stable from May to August at around 22 percent of available BTC. The amount of BTC held for investment also showed stability during the same period at around 30 percent.
Also in March, it suddenly emerged that the abovementioned startup Crypto Facilities has been offering futures contracts tied to Ripple’s XRP token since October 2016, without much publicity, for some reason. On May 11, Crypto Facilities exploded another bombshell in the crypto space, revealing ETH/USD futures as their latest offering. And to crown it all, in June the same company unveiled the first regulated Litecoin futures.
Right now, I can use my bitcoin holdings to pay for purchases at Overstock (OSTBP), or book a hotel on Expedia (EXPE). But if I use bitcoin to buy $25 worth of socks on Overstock today, and the price of bitcoin quadruples next week, I'll feel like those socks actually cost me $100. Then again, if bitcoin crashes, at least I'll always have the socks.
It didn’t take a genius to see a clear arbitrage opportunity here, and I wrote up a quick blog post detailing this opportunity and fired out a single Facebook post telling my friends about it. From that post and just a few hours of work, I ended up earning almost 17 bitcoins entirely for free — worth over $45,000 today. I had plans to scale this strategy en masse, but singlehandedly ended up killing the program almost as soon as it started, when Coinbase finally came to its senses and realized just how much money it was hemorrhaging here with no hope for eventual recoupment (at the time, the lifetime value of the average customer was only something like $25 to Coinbase — a far cry from the $75 they were offering).

Dubbed as NXT 2.0 – Ardor is a scalable blockchain platform that natively supports a wide range of features including voting, privacy based coin mixing, account management, blockchain storage, transaction aliasing, and built in marketplace creation. However, Ardor’s implementation of child chains is the stand out feature that makes this platform a truly innovative project.

While Goldman Sachs’ skeptical stance on crypto “remains intact,” the investment bank’s CEO Lloyd Blankfein has suggested that the adoption of crypto like Bitcoin could happen in a similar way as that of paper money, which replaced gold and silver coins. In an interview in June, Blankfein stated that it is “too arrogant” to argue that crypto cannot be adopted on a large scale only because it is “uncomfortable” or “unfamiliar.”

Personally, for myself, a quick back of the napkin calculation that I can do to estimate the possible future value of bitcoin is to see what the market has valued all of the gold in the world at, and use this as a rough guiding principle for seeing how much appetite the world currently has for something that can hedge against other currencies and holds similar characteristics to gold as a store of value. I can see that the total value of all the gold in the world is over 8 trillion dollars, and consequently, if bitcoin were to reach that same total valuation, each bitcoin, assuming 21 million eventual bitcoins, would be worth approximately $400,000. Dividing this by bitcoin’s current value, I can see that there’s still room for approximately 150X gains. This means that if I truly believe this is a possible outcome for bitcoin, then as long as I believe this outcome has more than a 0.66 percent chance of happening, or 1/150 chances of success, it would be an +EV bet to make.
Monero (10%) – Monero is similar to Bitcoin in that it allows value exchange. However, Monero differs from Bitcoin in that it is focused on providing greater privacy to those that utilize their blockchain, using their stealth address mechanism. Anonymity is likely to become more and more important in a world where Bitcoin addresses can be traced. As more regulation starts entering the cryptocurrency space, an increasing number of individuals will gravitate towards privacy coins such as Monero, Zcash and Dash, that can mask their transaction activities.
Generally, the strategy suggested to average out such short term volatility for something that one is investing in long term is to practice dollar cost averaging. This preaches that one should set an exact time at regular time intervals to buy an exact amount in fiat currency of the investment one is looking to purchase — e.g., $1,000 worth of bitcoin on the 1st of every week, or every month. This means that over time, you’ll be able to take advantage of bitcoin’s general trajectory upwards, but balance out the relative short term volatile price movements both high and low, such that you experience a more linear growth trajectory over time of your principal.

This serves a dual purpose of both allowing extreme transparency when desired in making transactions, and also allowing a lot of anonymity when desired. If one wants to ensure that they have perfect undeniable proof of their transactions, all they have to do is prove they own certain bitcoins, and then any and all transactions conducted with those bitcoins are undeniably theirs and most certainly occurred.

Bitcoin v alt balancing: my BTC v altcoin positions are balanced relative to how Bitcoin market dominance is trending, you can see this chart on CoinMarketCap. If Bitcoin market dominance is at 50% but falling, then my Bitcoin position will be at less than 40%. If Bitcoin market dominance is 50% but rising then my Bitcoin position will be over 60%. The reason I keep it ahead of the trend but never 100% of one is that BTC v altcoin market cycles change, there are times when they trade inversely and other times where they rise and fall together and as such this gives a more even growth trajectory.

Futures are financial contracts obligating the buyer to purchase an asset or the seller to sell an asset, such as a physical commodity or a financial instrument, at a predetermined future date and price. Futures contracts detail the quality and quantity of the underlying asset; they are standardized to facilitate trading on a futures exchange. Some futures contracts may call for physical delivery of the asset, while others are settled in cash.

Retailer Acceptance – A cryptocurrency isn’t much of use if you can’t purchase anything with it, so before you invest in it, it’s very important to know who and where it was accepted. Some coins are simply built for other purposes and they aren’t designed to be exchanged for goods. Some of the popular cryptocurrencies are widely accepted just like Bitcoin, while some cryptocurrencies can only be exchanged for other cryptocurrencies.

Are my investments safe with the dev team? The first rule of investing should always be the preservation of capital. Can you trust the dev team with your money? Are you about to leave your money with founders who have been involved in previous scams? If you see these telling signs, back off immediately. The coin’s price might grow for all you care, but it is just not worth it to put your capital at such risk.

The same growth trajectory is how I see bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and blockchain technology at large playing out. If all goes well — and there’s no guarantee it might, everything indeed might fail and all our hopes and dreams might gang aft agley — there’s no reason at all that bitcoin can’t one day surpass even our wildest imaginations today, just like the internet did before it, and fundamentally rewrite the script for how we interact with money and the world as a whole.

I am a Crypto investor, I am not a trader. I prefer to focus my time and energy on researching and understanding the macro crypto economy and investing in those assets which I believe will exist over a more extended time-frame. As the inevitable market squeeze happens, I want my investments to be those that survive, similar to those who were invested in Google and Amazon when the dot-com bubble burst.

Bitcoin still is the king of crypto. It drags altcoins down hard when it drops, but, conversely, doesn’t necessarily cause altcoins to spike when it rises. Ultimately, you will have to decide whether your end game is to build as much Bitcoin holdings is possible by exchanging your altcoins, or whether you believe altcoins have a sustainable, profitable future too.

Indeed, the only thing a 51% attacker could really accomplish is destroying collective faith in bitcoin. They couldn’t somehow steal and gain all the value of bitcoins for itself. The attacker wouldn’t be able to generate new bitcoins on demand arbitrarily, and would still have to mine for them. They also would have no control over taking bitcoins created in the past that didn’t belong to them. The only thing they could do, really, is repeatedly spend bitcoin they already owned again and again, but even this is limited in its value, because ‘honest’ miner nodes would never accept these fraudulent payments.

The emergence of Bitcoin has sparked a debate about its future and that of other cryptocurrencies. Despite Bitcoin’s recent issues, its success since its 2009 launch has inspired the creation of alternative cryptocurrencies such as Litecoin, Ripple and MintChip. A cryptocurrency that aspires to become part of the mainstream financial system would have to satisfy very divergent criteria. While that possibility looks remote, there is little doubt that Bitcoin’s success or failure in dealing with the challenges it faces may determine the fortunes of other cryptocurrencies in the years ahead.

Grayscale Investment Trust is the sponsor of the Bitcoin Investment Trust, and it charges shareholders an annual expense ratio in order to manage the fund. The current charge is 2% of assets, and because the trust's bitcoin holdings don't generate regular income for trust shareholders, Grayscale has the ability to liquidate bitcoin in order to pay itself its fee. That's the reason why over time, each share of the trust will be equivalent to a decreasing amount of bitcoin, as fees eat into the trust's principal assets.
Mike Novogratz on Cryptocurrencies by Bloomberg: https://www.pscp.tv/w/1zqKVrjdqVWKB helps to state what should be obvious...how can you rationally not allocate at least a single digit percentage of your portfolio to a technology (blockchain) that has proveable working models that once scaled have massive disruption capabilities to financial markets, consumer markets, et al. The asymmetric potential is historic. Position size your investments and participate. Outstanding interview and Michael is the man for the interviewing job...Morehead and Krug are the spokesman for crypto state of the union addresses. Well done RV.
In the case of less risky users which prefer long-term investment, it is important to build a diversified cryptocurrency portfolio. Fiat investors usually use benchmark indices such as S&P500 and Nasdaq Composite as they allow the opportunity to trade whole sectors easily and manage complicated portfolios in a straightforward investment, thus reducing the risks and volatility of the portfolio.
NEW YORK, Nov. 22, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Grayscale Investments, LLC, the sponsor (the "Sponsor") of the Bitcoin Investment Trust (OTCQX: GBTC) (the "Trust"), announced that it has today declared a distribution and established a record date for the distribution of a portion of the rights to Bitcoin Gold tokens currently held by the Trust as a result of the fork in the Bitcoin blockchain on October 24, 2017 to shareholders of record ("Record Date Shareholders") as of the close of business on December 4, 2017 (the "Record Date").

• In the United States, although Coinbase seems the go-to option in many cases, bear in mind that’s only an exchange, not a broker. You would be wiser to choose, for instance, TradeStation, one of the most reputable brokers, with a great site, great trading options and a solid mobile app. Because, you know, the crypto market moves so fast that you want to be able to check it while you’re drinking your Chai latte on your commute or waiting for your friends to show up at the bar.

Be a part of the future of blockchain by owning the cryptocurrency products that are solving real problems to better humanity. I have started a cryptocurrency community where we uncover the projects that are building a better future for tomorrow and how we can profit from them when they do. One such example can be found by clicking here. If you like the way we work, there are a lot more where that came from. I hope to see you inside.
Do note that this will put your portfolio out of balance. But it’s prudent to do this as a measure of risk mitigation whenever your portfolio has been doing incredibly well. The market won’t go up forever, and you can rest assured that there will always be another correction. By taking profits in Bitcoin, you partly secure your profits while at the same time staying in the game lest you miss out on another leg of a bull run.
Moreover, in the event of a hard fork, whereby two blockchains are created, and consequently, two sets of coins that you technically should own, only some exchanges will actually give you access to both sets of coins. Most notably, Coinbase has explicitly stated that they will only give you access to the dominant blockchain that emerges from a hard fork, no matter how much value the market assigns the non-dominant chain. They may or may not give you access to the other coins in the future, but there is no guarantee either way. In any event, with any exchange you are fundamentally agreeing to trust them to give you access to both sets of your coins, even if they say they will. If you own your coins yourself in your own wallet, however, you need to trust no one. You will automatically own both sets of coins by default in the event of any fork.
Of course, last year's cryptocurrency craze ran circles around traditional equities, including stocks. After beginning the year with a combined market cap of just $17.7 billion, the aggregate market cap of all virtual currencies by year's end had surged to $613 billion, equaling a climb of more than 3,300%. There may not be another year like this for any asset class for as long as we live.
Bitcoin Investment Trust is an entity that was established to give investors a way to get exposure to the bitcoin market without actually buying their own bitcoin. The trust itself owns a substantial amount of the cryptocurrency -- roughly 200,000 bitcoin currently. Each share of the trust works out to just under 0.001 bitcoin, meaning an equivalent net asset value of roughly $6.50 with bitcoin prices near $6,500 per token.
Bitcoin futures have fairly extreme pros and cons to them. Contracts are leveraged in that you're paying a fraction of bitcoin's actual price when you buy futures, giving you a chance to profit off them. However, the contract has an expiration date in the near future. If the price is down when it expires, you can't simply hold and wait to see if it bounces back; you just lose.
The futures markets are characterized by the ability to use very high leverage relative to stock markets. Futures can be used to hedge or speculate on the price movement of the underlying asset. For example, a producer of corn could use futures to lock in a certain price and reduce risk, or anybody could speculate on the price movement of corn by going long or short using futures.
This is how we think about Distributed Global Fund II. We currently hold fewer than 20 positions. We expect that even with only 20 positions a number of them will not exist in 2022. You can be buy and hold in this marketplace, but you can’t be buy and go to sleep. The market moves too fast, and because it’s open source a differentiating function of one coin can quickly be copied and integrating into others.
Holding gold privately removes the need to trust either of these points of failure in the modern banking system, but comes with its own host of problems. Namely, while gold has proven to be an excellent store of value over time, it is incredibly poor for actual day to day use in the modern economy. To transact with gold is excessively cumbersome and inconvenient. No one would consider walking around with an ounce of gold on them, measuring and shaving off exact portions of gold to pay for a cup of coffee, groceries, or a bus ride. Worse, it’s even more difficult and time consuming to send gold to anyone who isn’t physically in the same exact location as you.

In all of these cases, however, a value investor first and foremost must decide, with rigorous analysis and thorough examination, what they believe the fair value of an investment to be, and what degree of future potential it has. Only from there do they then examine what value the market has assigned the investment, in order to ascertain whether or not the investment is a wise one likely to yield good returns. Under no circumstances should one ever buy into a stock without knowing much, or anything at all about the stock, save for the general market sentiment or hype surrounding it, and its short term price movements. Buying a stock merely because it has seen great gains in the past, without any understanding of why it saw those gains and what gains it might expect to see in the future based on fundamental analysis of the stock, is an inordinately risky and foundationally bereft strategy.

Bitcoin v alt balancing: my BTC v altcoin positions are balanced relative to how Bitcoin market dominance is trending, you can see this chart on CoinMarketCap. If Bitcoin market dominance is at 50% but falling, then my Bitcoin position will be at less than 40%. If Bitcoin market dominance is 50% but rising then my Bitcoin position will be over 60%. The reason I keep it ahead of the trend but never 100% of one is that BTC v altcoin market cycles change, there are times when they trade inversely and other times where they rise and fall together and as such this gives a more even growth trajectory.
From there, you’re ready to buy and sell Bitcoin based on the current market value. Rather than paying for a set amount of Bitcoin, you will tell the exchange how much money you want to trade, and they’ll break down how much Bitcoin you can buy. Unless you’re investing thousands of dollars into the cryptocurrency, you’re likely to be buying a fraction of one Bitcoin.
For those who are more comfortable with a predictable form of reward, mining is the way. Mining involves setting up of a rig, consisting of GPUs or CPUs and an investment in the electricity. Mining is only possible on cryptocurrencies that follow the Proof of Work protocol. It takes some effort to setup and gets things running, but it is attractive as a long-term passive income as long as you frontload the work.
Fusion Media would like to remind you that the data contained in this website is not necessarily real-time nor accurate. All CFDs (stocks, indexes, futures), Forex and cryptocurrencies prices are not provided by exchanges but rather by market makers, and so prices may not be accurate and may differ from the actual market price, meaning prices are indicative and not appropriate for trading purposes. Therefore Fusion Media doesn’t bear any responsibility for any trading losses you might incur as a result of using this data.